Adirondack Park

The Adirondack Park is a publicly protected area in northeast New York. It's the largest park and the largest state-level protected area in the contiguous United States .... The park covers some 6.1 million acres (9,400 mi²/24,700 km²), a land area greater than Vermont, or of Yellowstone, Yosemite, Grand Canyon, Glacier, and Great Smoky Mountains National Parks combined. Much of the land is directly controlled by the state's Forest Preserve, but more than half the land within the Adirondack Park is privately owned, including several villages and hamlets.

The vast majority of the Adirondack Mountains are within the bounds of the traditional territory of the Mohawk First Nation until at least 1720. A sedentary agrarian democratic society before Contact, they controlled the eastern part of the Haudenosaunee Confederacy or Six Nations. The Mohawk population had already been decimated by European diseases when they were largely driven out of their homeland by foreign European settlers. Although the Confederacy was divided, most of the Iroquois sided with the British during the American Revolution. After the war, most of the Iroquois land which fell within the American border was forcefully signed over through treaties or seized outright. During the 1800s, the U.S. Government forced most of the Iroquois off their traditional territory into reservations in the Midwest to punish them for having sided with the British .....

In 1885, legislation declared that the land in the Adirondack Park and the Catskill Park was to be conserved and never put up for sale or lease. The park was established in 1892, due to the activities of Colvin and other conservationists. The park was given state constitutional protection in 1894, so that the state-owned lands within its bounds would be protected forever ('forever wild'). The part of the Adirondack Park under government control is referred to as the Adirondack Forest Preserve. Further, this became a National Historic Landmark in 1963 .....